Garry Winogrand, the Photographer Who Captured the Madness of the Mad Men Era

Photos:Garry Winogrand, the Photographer Who Captured the Madness of the Mad Men Era

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Coney Island, New York, 1952. Figures in Winogrand’s early work often have a sculptural monumentality—the couple here is playful yet epic, and characteristically, shot from behind and silhouetted. The people in the background prefigure later Winogrand photos of motel swimming pools in which swimmers appear as mysterious as the Loch Ness Monster in that famous grainy snapshot.

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I had cause not long ago to read Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s 1955 book of poetry A Coney Island of the Mind, in which he conjures a landscape of “mindless prairies” and “supermarket suburbs,” crisscrossed by “freeways fifty lanes wide on a concrete continent spaced with bland billboards illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness.”

O.K., yes: in 2014, after three or four generations of suburban alienation—and the long march of artists steeped in that alienation (the Johns, Cheever and Updike; the Davids, Byrne and Lynch; Warhol before he turned court portraitist; and virtually every indie-rock band and high-school movie)—we might feel we know Ferlinghetti’s “supermarket suburbs” all too well. But there’s valor here, too: the poet was writing at a time when America’s post-war boom was something new and strange and unprecedented; when American life was a phenomenon that demanded to be grappled with rather than merely sentimentalized, mocked, or mourned. The poem pulses with that immediacy, with 1958-ness.

You can get a similar time-traveling jolt from the photographs of Garry Winogrand, who was active in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and early 80s, before dying abruptly in 1984, at the age of 56, of a rare cancer of the gall bladder. His pictures of postwar American streets and neighborhoods, parties and political conventions—strange and off-kilter, distanced yet vibrant, simultaneously funny and sad—can work like visual smelling salts, snapping viewers out of drowsy condescension to scenes they think they’ve scene a thousand times; these are images as startling as the day they were snapped. I would bet you $10, maybe even $15, that Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men, is a devotee. An excellent retrospective of Winogrand’s work opened last week in New York, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (after appearing at the two institutions which organized it: the San Francisco Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.), and if you’re interested enough to have read this far, or flipped through the following slideshow, you’d be foolish not to see the actual show.

Winogrand frequently described himself as “a student of America” and called the postwar growth of suburbs “the main story of [his] time.” That’s all true, and it’s right there on the surface of his work, but it also makes Winogrand sound more academic and calculating than I think he was. I like this quote of his from 1980, cited in the exhibition, which gets at the spirit behind his pictures: “Sometimes I feel like . . . the world is a place I bought a ticket to. It’s a big show for me, as if it wouldn’t happen if I wasn’t there with a camera.”

America is spectacle in Winogrand’s work, a big noisy parade across regions and classes. But it’s an uneasy, anxious parade, too, one in which individuals are often swallowed up by their surroundings, prisoners of circumstance, rather than the trailblazers and lone wolves of national myth. Traffic must have fascinated Winogrand: in shot after shot, men, women, and children seem caged in their huge, shiny, big-finned 50s and 60s cars, their humanity overwhelmed by steel and chrome, almost as if they were driving coffins instead of automobiles—the open road as dead end. (These are Ferlinghetti’s “strung-out citizens in painted cars [with] strange license plates and engines that devour America.”) Similarly, in shots of elaborately coiffed socialites, the women look as if they’ve been imprisoned by their own hair. A family reunion at LAX—the husband holds a sign that says WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA JANE—is dwarfed by the airy, sterile geometry of the airport itself, and like a lot of Winogrand’s pictures, the image makes you aware of how he didn’t shoot it: up close, heightening the sentimental drama of the reunion, the way a Life photographer would have. To Winogrand’s eye, Jane, whoever she was, might as well have been just another piece of freight, her journey a mere transaction in the jet-age economy.

I don’t meant to imply that Winogrand’s work is cold or uncompassionate; his subjects may appear more as archetypes than individuals, but distance often renders their isolation all the more poignant. In one of his best-known pictures, shot in front of a home in Albuquerque in 1957, a boy in diapers appears poised between running down the driveway and disappearing into the cool black void of a carport; the flat-roof house itself is on the literal edge of a desert, its newness and cheap modernity juxtaposed with—and threatened by—the ancient landscape. Who knows? The boy might have been perfectly well-adjusted; he may be living in the same house today, a happy sexagenarian rooted in his landscape; but all the same, there’s a mystery and ambiguity in the image that, to my mind, evokes the tension between the famous American itch to light out for new territory, to escape, and the difficulty of doing so in a country of narrowing horizons.

Is the boy’s tipped-over tricycle a symbol of that tension? Sometimes a tricycle is just a tricycle, but if I’m reading into Winogrand’s pictures, it’s only fair, since he himself was well aware of photography’s gift for making up stories while seeming to tell truths. Jeff Rosenheim, the Met’s head curator of photography (and a friend of mine), was a student of Winogrand’s. Rosenheim recalls Winogrand telling him not to worry about the story behind an image: “Forget the original situation. It’s gone. Look at the picture. . . . A photograph is a new thing—an illusion, a lie, a transformation.” You couldn’t ask for a more honest summation of the medium’s power, and of Winogrand’s.